Arizona Wildlife Views Magazine

"The Last Cowpony," by Carol Lynde

This article was published in the November–December 2009 issue of Arizona Wildlife Views magazine. Support Arizona's award-winning wildlife magazine — order online.

I once spent my days
Under saddle and spur.
A good tool and companion
We old cowponies were.
Now the campfire’s gone silent,
The day’s lonely and long,
What’s an old cowpony to do
When all the cowboys are gone?
–Carol Lynde

For Apache Kid, it’s not so much that all the cowboys are gone, as that they’ve gone on to using new tools to get their work done.

I first encountered Apache Kid at Raymond Wildlife Area while shooting some video of the buffalo herd for “Arizona Wildlife Views Television.” From a corral near the main house, this old horse watched with great interest as wildlife area manager Allen Zufelt and I drove back in from the lower pasture. “There’s somebody I’d like you to meet,” said Zufelt as he took me over and introduced me to a slightly swaybacked gray horse. Ears perked and eyes bright, Apache Kid appeared brimming with curiosity. It was love at first muzzle nuzzle.

In addition to his incredible charm and big brown eyes, Apache Kid is special for another reason. This old guy is the last of his kind. From a herd that once numbered in the dozens, he is the only remaining horse owned by the Arizona Game and Fish Department.

Good Years in the Saddle

Going back as far as 1913, when G.M. Willard was named the state’s first game warden, the department has owned a small assortment of mules and horses. Over the decades, they’ve transported people and equipment to places not even a four-wheel-drive could get to.

Jim Wegge was a wildlife manager with the department from 1961 until he retired in 2003. He says, “The reason these animals were so important to wildlife studies was back in the ‘old days’ in order to track an animal with a radio collar you used to have to do a triangulation with a hand-held telemeter, which meant you had to be within about 1 or 2 miles of the animal, depending on the terrain, to get a signal. Now they have satellite collars and you can sit at your computer and track an animal.”

From 1973 to the mid-1980s, Wegge worked on countless bear studies up on Four Peaks, northeast of Phoenix. Bears make it a point not to live in convenient locations, and a horse or mule was mandatory to reach the study areas. Wegge, who preferred mules for their sure-footedness and even temperament, got his favorite mule, Abe, as a 4-year-old. Abe was smooth-gated, with a sweet disposition and good instincts to match.

One time on a narrow Four Peaks trail, Wegge and Abe were crossing a talus slope (that area on the side of a mountain that looks like a waterfall of rocks). The “trail” consisted of about a 1-foot-wide bench cut into the slope. They were crossing a 60-foot stretch of talus when Abe just froze in his tracks. A few seconds later, Wegge realized the slope had started to shift and move. Fortunately, the rocks only slipped a few inches before settling back in. As they continued their trek, Wegge realized that Abe had sensed the movement before he did. By standing stock still, Abe had made the right decision for both of them.

Sadly, a few years later, Abe was struck by lightning while standing under a tree in a pasture when a thunderstorm came up. He may have had great instincts on the mountain, but perhaps he wasn’t so smart at understanding that lightning aims for the tallest point in an area.

Abe was replaced by Timber, a mule that became something of a legend in the department for his work ethic and longevity. He is the only animal ever awarded a 20-year service pin by the Arizona Game and Fish Department.
Timber saw a lot of people through their rookie year with the department. It was common for biology interns, whether they had any riding experience or not, to spend their first summer on horseback, following snare lines in the mountains while conducting animal studies. Brian Wakeling, now head of the department’s Game Branch, was one such intern. In 1982, he was making a whopping $10 a day when he discovered that the mule he was riding was allotted $15 a day. “It gave me a very humbling sense of where I stood in the department’s pecking order to know that my mule was making more than I was.”

Still, Wakeling says some of his best days were spent riding in the field. A perfect week for him was three days in the saddle and two days in the office to handle the paperwork. Those days in the saddle weren’t always perfect, though. “Of course the day you would catch three bears would also be the day the monsoon storms hit and everyone was wet and miserable, but you had no choice except to deal with the bears and do your work. But at least you were on horseback.”

The department used horses and mules not only to move people over harsh terrain, but to haul everything imaginable, including wildlife. They hauled packs of fish to stock remote mountain lakes and streams as well as Gould’s turkeys for translocation into the rugged mountains of southwestern Arizona.

As people, we tend to attach a lot of our human emotions to animals, although there is no evidence that they feel things the same way we do. Still, they do understand kindness and patience and companionship and they give those things back to us many times over. Your best horse is like your best friend — it will see you through, no matter what kind of day you’re having or what fool thing you ask it to do. One year, Wegge kept track of the hours he spent riding and discovered he had logged between 160 and 170 days in the saddle. That was a good year, as far as he was concerned.

Four Legs Means Freedom

The department has never owned all the horses and mules it used. Many belonged to wildlife managers, biologists and other personnel who received an annual allotment to pay for the feed and board of their horses and mules while the animals were doing work for the Game and Fish Department. In its “hay day” during the ’70s and ’80s, there were between 35 and 50 animals in the allotment program, but today that number has dwindled to about six across the state.

The reasons for the decline are simple and pragmatic: When you aren’t using your all-terrain vehicle to get around, you can just park it and forget it, while a horse has to be fed and housed year-round. A few still are kept on retainer, because there still are some places that only four-legged power can reach. The retired Apache Kid, in contrast, is the last horse the department owns rather than retains. He even has a state inventory asset number.

Whether owned or retained, horses and mules have helped the state manage its wildlife resources for nearly a century. For example, horses and mules were major players in the recovery of the Apache trout, according to Tom Britt, a retired regional office supervisor. The endangered native fish were packed out of Mount Baldy to North Canyon by horseback.

Britt recalls fondly that he liked working with “horse people” when he was posted up at the House Rock Valley Wildlife Area because, “They were used for survey work and law enforcement, and it was great because there were no travel restrictions on horseback.”

Not every equine outing went smoothly. Brian Wakeling recalled that about 13 years ago a representative from the National Wild Turkey Federation packed in with his team on a turkey release at Powers Garden in the Galiuros Mountains. The Turkey Federation fellow was riding a mule and leading a pack horse when the horse slipped. He lost hold of the lead rope and the poor pack horse basically fell off the trail.

Wakeling was behind them on another horse, yelling and cursing, “Whoa, stop, dagnabit,” as the pack horse rolled down the hill. Wakeling got off his mount and ran down to the anxious animal, which was now wedged under a tree branch. Wakeling cut the pack off, got the horse back up on its feet and coaxed it up the steep hill and back onto the trail. Despite a nasty gash in its shoulder, the horse was able to make the rest of the trip out of the mountains. It’s the worst “horse” crash Wakeling knows of.

Even with the rough days, there was an independence to working on horseback that Wegge likens to backpacking in the wilderness. “You know that sense of freedom you get when you put on the pack and leave the car and know you don’t have to get back in that car for several days? That’s how it was on my mules. You had so much mobility. When running a bear snare line, you would be riding for 11 days, then you would start all over the next day. It was great.”

The Lonesome Pasture

That takes us back to Apache Kid. He was purchased in Springerville, Ariz., in the mid-1990s for use at the House Rock Valley Wildlife Area. There, he and his rider, Daryl Magnuson, spent their days working the buffalo herd and doing general maintenance at the ranch. On at least one occasion, Apache Kid saved both their hides by outrunning a charging bull buffalo.

Magnuson retired in 2000, and a few years later, so did Apache Kid. He came up lame and was moved to Raymond Wildlife Area to enjoy his senior years in peace. But being “put out to pasture” isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be, especially when there’s no one to share your retirement with. Though area manager Allen Zufelt treats Apache Kid like the big pet he has become, Zufelt hopes that one of the local ranchers will pasture the old horse with his own kind. “He gets kind of lonely just out here all by himself,” Zufelt says.

When remembering his days with Apache Kid, Magnuson seems sweetly melancholy at how quickly the years pass. “That was a long time ago,” he says with more than a little nostalgia in his voice. But Apache Kid is still here. At 26, his step may be a little slower, but his eyes are just as bright, as if to say, “Hey, isn’t it time to saddle up and go check that fence line? Oh, by the way — you wouldn’t happen to have any carrots on you, would ya? I like carrots, and, OK, you can scratch my head if you want to.”

Once Apache Kid is gone, we will have left an era behind and moved on into the future. And for all we gain by that, there is something — a connection to our history — the mystical bond between cowboy and cowpony — the gentle touch of a muzzle — that, once lost, I’m not sure we can regain.

back to top